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Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s Apollo Mission

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The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science

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Abstract

This essay examines the relationships between literature and science with respect to twentieth-century lunar exploration, demonstrating how difficult it can be to distinguish between literary and scientific knowledge; decisive events in the history of human knowledge frequently occur along the boundary between the two. After considering literary representations of the moon from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jules Verne, and Italo Calvino, this essay concentrates on a multimedia project by the German poet and artist Ferdinand Kriwet concerned with the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. Kriwet’s multimedia project engages simultaneously with scientific and literary forms of knowledge, implying that the moon’s literary status as an object of longing may not be exhausted by its scientific conquest, after all.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Kurt Beals

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  1. Kurt Beals
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Neel Ahuja

  2. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Monique Allewaert

  3. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Lindsey Andrews

  4. Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Gerry Canavan

  5. Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX, USA

    Rebecca Evans

  6. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Nihad M. Farooq

  7. University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA

    Erica Fretwell

  8. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Nicholas Gaskill

  9. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Patrick Jagoda

  10. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA

    Erin Gentry Lamb

  11. Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

    Jennifer Rhee

  12. University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Britt Rusert

  13. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Matthew A. Taylor

  14. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Aarthi Vadde

  15. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Priscilla Wald

  16. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Rebecca Walsh

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Beals, K. (2020). Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s Apollo Mission. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_2

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